When I first encountered Charles Ives’s music as a teenager in college, some 50 years ago, I was struck by how I could not anticipate, when listening to several works in succession, what the next piece—or even the next moment within a piece—would be like. In class, we heard an excerpt from the Fourth Symphony that imitated the sound of a steam locomotive. Intrigued, I listened to the Third Symphony, which sounded late Romantic in style—nothing like the Fourth. The Unanswered Question was strange: it began with calm, flowing harmonies for strings, then suddenly a second, atonal layer appeared in the trumpets and flutes, as if two completely unrelated pieces were being played at once. Other pieces juxtaposed modern dissonances with fragments of popular music, from a band march to ragtime. The experience was both exhilarating and unsettling. The diversity of Ives’s music seemed messy, chaotic, even undisciplined, and my teachers did not know how to explain it.
Aaron Copland had a similar reaction when he encountered Ives’s self-published collection of 114 Songs (1922). In a retrospective 1934 review, Copland wrote that in it
almost every kind of song imaginable can be found—delicate lyrics, dramatic poems, sentimental ballads, German, French, and Italian songs, war songs, songs of religious sentiment, street songs, humorous songs, hymn tunes, folk tunes, encore songs; songs adapted from orchestral scores, piano works, and violin sonatas; intimate songs, cowboy songs and mass songs. Songs of every character and description, songs bristling with dissonances, tone clusters and “elbow chords” next to songs of the most elementary harmonic simplicity.
For Copland, this variety was clearly not a strength; he would have preferred a more focused collection of songs in modern styles, omitting those written in Romantic or popular idioms. But for Ives, this stylistic diversity represented his own musical experience. However different from the others, each of his songs was an honest expression of its time and context and had value of its own, earning a place in the book. As he wrote in the postface to the collection, “a song has a few rights the same as other ordinary citizens.”
Ives was on to something neither Copland nor I understood: you miss a lot of valuable music—and people and experiences—if you narrow the range of what you find acceptable. We now live surrounded by the wildest, widest variety of music ever, from hip hop to electronica, from world music to postmodern operas, all available in an instant on our phones, computers, and smart speakers. Somehow Ives seems to capture for us the art of paying attention to all these competing voices, giving them their due, while keeping a firm sense of one’s own center, one’s own hometown, musically speaking. In his music, Ives models for us a world that is varied, complex, diverse, and contradictory, and his embrace of all of it can show us how to listen to every voice and see the good in everyone.
His diversity of style reflects his background. As a child and young man, he experienced many strands of American popular music, Protestant church music, and classical music, learning how to perform and compose in those traditions while also experimenting with new techniques. In his mature works, he blended elements from these traditions to create music unlike anything ever heard before. That mixing took place in the genres of the classical tradition that he assimilated in his studies at Yale with Horatio Parker, one of the leading American composers of the day. For Parker, music was a spiritual and moral force, with intuition being the surest guide for a composer. Ives absorbed Parker’s ideals, but he transcended his teacher and all his American predecessors by incorporating American melodies and styles and innovative new procedures into pieces in the classical tradition, creating a synthesis that spoke to his time and still speaks to us today.
A core part of that synthesis, and of Ives’s message, is his celebration of the music and music-making of common people in his region of New England and New York City. In his music, he upends the hierarchy of taste in which European classical music is more valuable than the everyday music of the United States. He asserts through his compositions that music from America is of equal value to its continental counterparts and bears witness to something precious.
His scores are full of people, represented through the music they make, hear, and love, and he finds in their lives and their music “a strength of hope that never gives way to despair—a conviction of the power of the common soul.” Hope is one of the great themes of Ives’s music: a celebration of the past, not as a place to return to, or to feel nostalgia for, but as inspiration for the future, with the struggles, triumphs, and endurance of previous generations serving as guides to the forward progress of humankind. In this time of war, pessimism, political polarization, and conflict over class, religion, gender, and diversity, Ives’s music remains remarkably relevant.
Ives’s celebration of America’s music began with songs like “Memories” (1897) and “The Circus Band” (c. 1899), which capture what it is like to hear music in a theater or on the street and be swept up by the associations it carries. In his First String Quartet (c. 1897–1900) and Second Symphony (c. 1902–1909), he adapted American hymn tunes and popular songs as themes, bringing them into the most prestigious genres and forms of European chamber and orchestral music. But he found a new depth in his Third Symphony (c. 1908–1911) and four violin sonatas (c. 1908–1917).
In the middle movement of Ives’s Fourth Violin Sonata, for instance, we hear fragments of melody in the piano and then in the violin: an idea that moves mostly by skip; a faster, sinuous line that alternates descending steps and upward skips; and a louder, hammering figure. The first two ideas are developed until the second of them becomes a gorgeous flowing melody in the violin over a rolling piano accompaniment. When that reaches a cadence, the hammering figure takes over in the piano, loud and aggressive. After this contrasting middle section, the violin varies the flowing melody, then states it whole again, while the piano adapts the skipping idea into a more regular tune. Finally the two instruments switch material, the sinuous, flowing melody now in the piano over rolling accompaniment, the violin playing the slower tune full of skips. Only at this point—if we know the tune—are we likely to recognize this as the refrain of the children’s hymn Jesus Loves Me. Listeners in Ives’s day might have turned up their noses at the piece, or laughed out loud, if the violin had played that tune at the beginning of the movement. At the end, it is beautiful, a culmination. We may notice in retrospect that the flowing melody that emerges halfway through the movement and serves as a countermelody to Jesus Loves Me at the end is itself derived from the hymn tune, featuring similar contours, and that the hammering figure of the contrasting middle section is derived from it as well.
By developing these rich ideas from the hymn tune he borrows as a theme before he lets us hear it plainly, Ives makes us listen to the tune, when it finally arrives, with fresh ears, hearing in it new beauties and possibilities we never suspected were there. In the First Quartet and Second Symphony, Ives fixed up the American melodies to make them fit the context of inherited European forms. In the Fourth Violin Sonata, however, the developmental procedures Ives learned from European sonatas and symphonies lead to the American melody in all its beautiful simplicity, teaching us to listen with equally close attention to American music as we would a Beethoven symphony.
What is precious here is not just the tune itself, but the associations it brings. The Fourth Violin Sonata is subtitled “Children’s Day at the Camp Meeting.” It is not programmatic, not a picture of events, but instead is a kind of character piece in which the way Ives develops the hymn tunes he uses as themes helps to reflect the meanings those tunes carried for those who sang them in church and at revivals. Music has always been a kind of social glue, a connection between those who share it, whether performers, listeners, dancers, or worshippers. When Ives incorporates into a composition a hymn tune or another recognizable bit of music, it comes with some of that “social glue” attached, inviting us to be a part of a community that knows and uses this music.
That sense of community itself brings meaning and has value. As Ives wrote in Essays Before a Sonata,
if the Yankee [composer] can reflect the fervency with which “his gospels” were sung—the fervency of “Aunt Sarah,” who scrubbed her life away for her brother’s ten orphans, the fervency with which this woman, after a fourteen-hour work day on the farm, would hitch up and drive five miles through the mud and rain to “prayer meetin’,” her one articulate outlet for the fullness of her unselfish soul—if he can reflect the fervency of such a spirit, he may find there a local color that will do all the world good.
Ives highlights here the life and spirit of a woman, in whom he finds a spirit to inspire all of us. What is important is not the specific religious content of the hymns and gospel songs she sings but their role in the lives of those who sing them. By making these tunes the crucial element in sonatas and symphonies, Ives asserts that this music of rural or small-town, middle- or lower-class, less educated, common but sturdy folk is as valuable as the works of classical music enjoyed by urban patrons. Indeed, blending the two traditions in this way makes for an even stronger music than either alone: a distinctively American music that asserts the value of both everyday music and the classical tradition of which Ives’s music is a part.
In piece after piece, Ives represents the music-making of common people, and thus the people themselves, their experiences, their lives, and what they hold most dear. Ives puts all of that front and center in his symphonies, tone poems, chamber works, sonatas, and art songs, works in classical genres performed for audiences whose class, culture, and life experiences may be vastly different.
Movements of the Fourth Symphony, Second String Quartet, First Piano Sonata, and Second Orchestral Set also culminate in camp-meeting hymns, as do several songs. The finale of the Second Orchestral Set (c. 1915–1919) is especially moving, capturing an event Ives witnessed on the day in 1915 when the Lusitania was sunk. In Ives’s telling, as a large crowd gathered on the northbound elevated train platform at the Hanover Square station in downtown Manhattan, waiting for the next train,
a hand-organ or hurdy-gurdy was playing in the street below. Some workmen sitting on the side of the tracks began to whistle the tune, and others began to sing or hum the refrain. A workman with a shovel over his shoulder came on the platform and joined in the chorus, and the next man, a Wall Street banker with white spats and a cane, joined in it, and finally it seemed to me that everybody was singing this tune … as a natural outlet for what their feelings had been going through all day long.
The tune was “In the Sweet Bye and Bye,” “an old Gospel Hymn that had stirred many people of past generations.” Over a bed of repeating, overlapping figures in constant motion, representing traffic and other city noises, Ives presents portions and variants of the tune, which gradually come together until the whole refrain appears, loud and dynamic, “as though every man in New York must be joining in it.” The hymn, with its impassioned hope that “we shall meet on that beautiful shore,” was appropriate to the memory of those who died on a ship torpedoed at sea in wartime. But what gave the event such deep meaning for Ives, and led him to immortalize it in this movement, was that the diverse crowd of New Yorkers of all classes who did not know one another was able to express its shared feelings of grief by joining together in song. His unwieldy title for the movement captures what was most important: “From Hanover Square North, at the End of a Tragic Day, the Voice of the People Again Arose.”
Other pieces dwell on memories of amateur music-making from Ives’s youth in Danbury, Connecticut, especially of the band led by his father, George Ives. Decoration Day is a sound picture of the predecessor of Memorial Day as commemorated in Danbury in the decades after the Civil War, with George Ives’s band leading the procession to the town cemetery and back, and a lone bugle playing “Taps” over the graves of those who died in the war. The Fourth of July captures festivities in a small town, mixing patriotic and popular songs with dance tunes and firecrackers, as snatches of “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” build up to a thunderous climax, the complete tune played by an amateur brass band accompanied by a swirl of other sounds and songs. Country Band March, later incorporated into Putnam’s Camp (the second movement of Three Places in New England), captures the misadventures of an amateur band playing a concert on the Fourth of July. Bands march across the landscape in the Second and Fourth Symphonies and several other orchestral works, piano pieces, and songs. Washington’s Birthday has nothing to do with George Washington, but centers on a barn dance held on that holiday, the dance band playing a mix of American, Scottish, and Irish fiddle tunes. Here is an evocation of the growing Irish community in Danbury and New England, fiercely discriminated against in the mid-19th century (when job postings often said “No Irish Need Apply”) but becoming more accepted in Ives’s day. In all of these examples, what matters is the spirit of the music, the enthusiasm of the players, and the ways music provides opportunities for the community to gather and share common experiences, from mourning to dancing.
Ives’s music is deeply meaningful for those who recognize the tunes he borrows and know the culture they were a part of and the time they represent. But his music is still meaningful for those unfamiliar with these tunes. That was me, when I first started listening to Ives. Growing up with no religious training, I knew none of the hymns and only a few of the popular songs and fiddle tunes. I learned them all from listening to Ives, and by studying the informative program notes and secondary literature. But even without knowing specific tunes, I could tell a hymn tune from a dance tune, a patriotic song from a Stephen Foster song, and a march from anything else. Ives gives us these familiar things, drawing us into his music, inviting us to become part of the communities he celebrates, or at least to ask, “Why is this happening? what does this music mean?” The types of music he incorporates into his works are so well known worldwide that I believe almost everyone can catch the references to some extent and hear some of the associations such music carried for the people who made and enjoyed it.
Understanding those associations can add unexpected levels of meaning to the listening experience. For example, Ives’s mammoth Piano Sonata No. 2, titled Concord, Mass., 1840-60 (c. 1915–1919), is most famous for its tone pictures of male literary figures who lived in Concord in the decades before the Civil War: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. Yet the cyclic theme that binds all four movements together is the theme of the third movement, “The Alcotts,” the one movement that celebrates women.
Ives described the movement in Essays Before a Sonata, writing that he did not try to depict in it “the philosophic raptures of Bronson Alcott,” the transcendentalist teacher and writer. Rather, Ives sought to capture “the memory of that home under the elms” where Alcott lived with his wife and four daughters, among them Louisa May Alcott, whose novel Little Women portrayed their domestic life. In particular, the movement evokes music-making at home by the women in the family: “the Scotch songs and the family hymns that were sung at the end of each day,” “the little old spinet piano … on which Beth [one of the sisters in Little Women] played the old Scotch airs, and played at the Fifth Symphony.” Indeed, throughout the movement, hymns are transmuted into the motto from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and vice versa, while in the middle we hear what sounds like part of a sentimental Stephen Foster parlor song followed by snatches of a Scotch air, Wagner’s wedding march, and a popular song. The movement culminates in a climactic full statement of its theme that blends hymns with Beethoven, played loudly over pounding chords like the beginning of the Hammerklavier Sonata.
The blend of the commonplace with the transcendent is the point. In Essays Before a Sonata, Ives calls the theme “that human-faith-melody—transcendent and sentimental enough for the enthusiast or the cynic, respectively—reflecting an innate hope, a common interest in common things and common men—a tune the Concord bards are ever playing while they pound away at the immensities with a Beethoven-like sublimity.” In the music-making of these women, Ives finds “a strength of hope that never gives way to despair—a conviction in the power of the common soul.” This movement’s theme appears in fragments in the “Emerson” and “Hawthorne” movements, becomes a whole melody before our ears during “The Alcotts,” and then is recollected as “a transcendental tune of Concord” sounding over Walden Pond at the end of the final movement, “Thoreau.” All the men are singing the tune Beth plays on the little old spinet piano.
“A strength of hope that never gives way to despair—a conviction in the power of the common soul.” These words are applicable not just to “The Alcotts” and the Concord Sonata, but broadly to all of the movements and pieces in which Ives celebrates the music and music-making of those around him, past and present, in New England and New York City. In his words for the song “Down East” (1919), a rumination on “songs from mother’s heart” that culminates in “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” he says it plainly: “With those strains a stronger hope comes nearer to me.” We need that hope today, and we can find it in Ives’s music.
